The politics of arrival: Israeli borderscapes and the boundaries of artistic space in Emi Sfard’sInvasive Species

Abstract

This article explores ecologically-inflected conceptions of home and belonging through a detailed study of Invasive Species (2017), an immersive media installation by emerging artist Emi Sfard. The installation comprises two interactive video works created with the help of 3D computer programs that can be updated in real time. Both works relate in different ways to Israeli landscape imaginaries, and examine the hidden relations between human and nonhuman "border crossers" that contribute to the way in which the national contours of the state of Israel are sustained, on material, aesthetic and conceptual levels. As I will argue, the installation's critical edge resides in part in its refusal to remain within the picture plane, implicating spectators in the depicted images through gaming technologies, and so interspersing questions of national boundaries with those of the borders of the gallery space KEYWORDS Borders; Landscapes; Zionism; eco-imaginaries; immersion; Israeli artThere is no such thing as a non-aesthetic figuration of the border.-Rosello and Wolfe Introduction: on boundary work and immersive experiencesBorders and boundaries are typically defined as demarcation lines. Whether geo-political, ecological, or cultural, whether real or imagined, once set they are perceived as anonymous entities, superseding the individual (Boer 2006, 3). Recent scholarship, however, asks that we rethink the boundary and its derivatives (borders, frontiers, and so on) less as entities, and more as functions: moving attention away from the "what and where" of the boundary to the "how and why" of its construction and maintenance. Addressing the boundary as an entity conceals the "boundary work" involved in its production (ibid, 4,6). This is true also in the case of natural phenomena (rivers, mountains, forests), that are mobilized in discourse as means for naturalizing-taking for granted-certain borders and border effects (Rosello and Saunders 2017, 29-30). Thinking of the boundary as a function, instead of as an entity, is not to say that borders are not real, in the sense that they have concrete effects in the world; but it does ask that more attention will be given to the economic, political, cultural and sensory practices through which borders are established and experienced (Rosello and Wolfe 2017, 8). "Boundaries cannot be wished away", writes Inge Boer, "but will serve their ordering purposes better . . . if we accept their existence but take them as uncertain; not lines, but spaces, not rigid but open to negotiation. The resulting uncertain territories are the ground we stand on, together" (Boer 2006, 13). Such an approach understands borders as ever-changing zones of transformation. It also offers a more active role to those that cross borders and to those that dwell at the border zones, in the design of the spaces that they traverse and inhabit: in the words of Mireille Rosello and Timothy Saunders, "when border-crossing actors (people, goods and ideas) travel, they traverse an inherently shifting and unstable ...